The Editorial
On Friday, September 3rd, 2021, the Interim Leader of the Alliance for Patriotic Reorientation and Construction (APRC), Fabakary Tombong Jatta, announced to Gambians that his party had, on Thursday, September 2nd, 2021 signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the National People’s Party (NPP) to contest the December 4th, 2021 presidential election as political allies. The MoU has still not been released for public scrutiny, but according to Jatta, President Adama Barrow will be the leader and flagbearer of that alliance. With the signing of this agreement between the former rivals, the APRC will now throw its support behind Barrow’s reelection endeavors. That would not have happened as Jatta admitted without the explicit approval of the man he calls the “Supreme Leader” of their party — Yahya Jammeh — who’s currently living in a self-imposed exile in Equatorial Guinea.
President Barrow was a member of the United Democratic Party (UDP) from where he ascended to the presidency of the republic on an opposition coalition in December 2016. He ran against the incumbent president, Yahya Jammeh, who was the candidate for the APRC in that election. Barrow won that election which the former president conceded on a televised phone call but later rescinded his concession. The country was plunged into political uncertainty after Jammeh recanted his concession. The former president capitulated to relinquish power under the threat of a military invasion by regional powers, in West Africa, to install into office the then President-elect Adama Barrow.
Barrow, who had left the country in December 2016 during the impasse to attend a meeting of regional leaders in Bamako, went into a tactical retreat in Senegal without returning to The Gambia. He was sworn into office in Dakar from where he returned to The Gambia to formalize his government to run the country after Jammeh left office on January 22nd, 2017. Since then, President Barrow fell out with the UDP and removed members of that party from his cabinet including the man he had called his political godfather—Ousainou Darboe.
In trying to cling to power, Barrow created his own party and has been seeking political alliances to win his reelection. He seems to have secured the support of the National Reconciliation Party (NRP), the National Convention Party (NCP), the People’s Progressive Party (PPP), The Gambia Party for Democracy and Progress (GPDP), and the independent candidate Isatou Touray who are all serving as coalition partners in his government. It’s become evident to Barrow that the support of these allies will not be sufficient to guarantee him victory in the December election. In that desperate effort to win reelection, he has now formed an unholy alliance with his former foes—members of the APRC who are now singing his praises as “Adama Kairo Barrow.”
The NPP is an offshoot of the UDP that is now a bitter political foe. Both were ardent foes of the APRC. Political theorists hold the consensus that in politics, and by extension in international relations between nation-states, there are no permanent friends, allies or foes but permanent interests. Now, the NPP is a political ally of the APRC as they are in cohort in the misadventure to undermine the democratic gains the Gambian people achieved by removing from office a long-term illiberal president.
How did President Adama Barrow get where he’s today—that’s practically selling his soul to, and sleeping with the ‘devil’?
It started with Barrow’s naked calculation for his personal political interest. He refused to hold a referendum to reduce the power of an imperial presidency in the 1997 Constitution alongside introducing other good governance and electoral reforms. The president thought that sticking with the first-past-the-post, a system that Yahya Jammeh introduced in the Constitution to facilitate his perpetuation in power, will allow Barrow to easily win reelection. With the proliferations of political parties out of the discontents of his senile administration, Barrow rightly fears these new parties are likely to take votes away from him dooming his dream for reelection. The Mandinka proverb is timelessly true— “the eye will not see the straw that will poke it” into blindness. Had he reformed the constitution for the winner of the presidency to receive absolute majority instead of simple majority of votes, President Barrow would be in a stronger footing to face alone his strongest opposition in the second round of voting in December. Now, he has to face all of the opposition political parties or a coalition of them. Either calculus does not provide him a confident path to reelection. Barrow’s predecessor, Yahya Jammeh, also fiddled with the electoral laws to advantage his party but ended up conditioning the opposition political parties to form a coalition that uprooted him from power with just winning a plurality of votes. With his unholy alliance, Barrow is fretting to avoid the fate that befell Jammeh which is even closer than appears in his rearview mirrors.
President Barrow’s failure are too numerous to enumerate all of them here. He did not honor a single promise he made to his coalition partners and neither has he to The Gambia people for the promises they elected him to office. The litany of his failures is that there has been no constitutional reforms or referendum, no security sector reforms, endemic corruption, failure to serve only a three-year transition and then not contest the subsequent presidential election as a candidate, the pervasive lack of security in the country, chronic high level of underemployment and unemployment, sluggish economy, government incompetence, poor response to the Covid-19 pandemic, government waste and abuses from high offices, failure to implement recommendations of the commissions of inquiries, higher armed robbery and murder rates in the country, rudimentary healthcare system with dilapidate facilities with lack of trained providers and drugs, and unforgivably—poor leadership.
Many Gambians would have still managed with these failures as the nation could survive them and ultimately President Barrow. His unholy alliance posed an existential threat to The Gambia’s democratic expansion and survival. Since this new threat is not imaginary but very real, Gambians should vote President Barrow out of office on December 4th, 2021. The reason is simply because he’s formed an alliance with the neofascist political party in the country. That’s good enough reason for Gambians who love democracy, human rights, liberty, and freedom for themselves and all their compatriots not to vote for him.
In his speech at the APRC press conference in Cocoa Ocean Beach, Jatta validated the concerns and fears of Jammeh’s critics. He said all the abuses and “allegations of human rights violations” levelled against the AFPRC junta and APRC regime were not new under the sun as they have been occurring and will continue to occur in The Gambia in much as in other countries around the world. Members of the APRC have a mindset deeply rooted in fascism and antidemocratic tendencies. No one could redeem or reform but we all could isolate them into oblivion. They believed in brute force and have found a partner in President Barrow who has Machiavellian attraction to naked power for its sake. Given Barrow’s trepidations for political power sharing, APRC may be on a foolhardy adventure because he’s not an honorable man who will keep his words to even himself.
APRC’s main interests are to guarantee the return of Yahya Jammeh to The Gambia as an elder statesman to receive gratuities as a former president, be given amnesty from prosecution, be returned of all his properties seized by commissions of inquiries, grant prerogative of mercy for such convicted felons as retired Captain Yankuba Touray, etc. If the terms in the unsigned document that has been circulating in social media as the draft of the MoU signed by the parties are even remotely true, its power sharing agreement that naively promises the APRC party the post of the Vice Presidency, guarantees Yahya Jammeh’s return to the presidency with only one heartbeat away.
With a member of the APRC in the office of the Vice Presidency, if anything happens to President Barrow such as incapacitation, mental illness, death, resignation, impeachment, vote of no confidence, etc., the APRC Vice President stands to assume office who then could appointment Jammeh as his Vice President. In that apocalyptic nightmare scenario, that President would resign his office to allow Jammeh to reassume the office of the presidency. We could only imagine the hell that will befall on Gambians who fought to remove Jammeh from office in 2016 or have since then publicly abandoned his political party.
Yet still, Yahya Jammeh’s return to The Gambia as a private citizen without him facing trial for his alleged killings and abuses will be the ultimate affront to justice. Besides that, his mere presence in The Gambia is a national security threat. It perfectly suits his character to instigate an opened rebellion to return him to power. He has a history of it in July 1994 when he succeeded in a coup d’état, and in December 2016 when he attempted but failed to usurp power in another unconstitutional grab.
The reckless alliance building of President Barrow, today more than ever before, pose the greatest threat to our republic. It’s up to every Gambian to assume responsibility and duties of a patriotic citizen to work toward the creation of Coalition 2021 to remove President Barrow from office in December. Such a ‘godly alliance’ will not only seek to uproot another callous incumbent from power but must also elect to office an honest politician who will see his or her words as bonds to keep. This can be achieved if leaders and supporters of our multifarious political parties, in non-condescension, taper their egos by exercising respect, restraint, tolerance, patience, civility and genuine political accommodations toward one another.
These should start with the largest political party—whose leadership and members should engage in self-introspection to examine the reason Gambians, who fought and went to jail under Jammeh or even lost their loved ones to his political oppression, would consider themselves left with no alternative but to accept Barrow’s unholy alliance as the lesser evil rather than to vote for the presidential candidate of the UDP. Members of the UDP must be self-aware to reject the simplistic self-comforting excuses that their opponents “hate the UDP” or that its critics “are people who do not want voters to go to the UDP” as the reasons for rejecting their party. Some of these problems, the UDP must realize, are endemic within their party as they fester for all members of the party to resolve. The UDP, more than any other political party, could make it easier to establish a grand opposition coalition to unseat President Barrow from office. It must rise up to the challenge, once again, for the interest of democracy, political freedom, and liberty in The Gambia.
The Gambia has endured five years of the government of Coalition 2016. It may not survive the government of the unholy alliance of the NPP and APRC.